yaknow, it really sucks that I'm a 21 year old senior in college and I'm JUST NOW learning the true origins of the American slavery/European colonization. because I took a 3000 level African American history course at an exorbitantly expensive University. (1/?)

power-hungry European leaders deliberately ERASED African history to justify brutally kidnapping Africans and shipping them across the Atlantic where many of them died. (2/)

the ancient world's most powerful civilizations were in Africa. the Ghana empire, the Mali empire, Songhay, all their legacies erased by Europeans. bruh Africans were smelting iron while Europeans still used stone tools (3/)

but wait!! you can't claim Africans are unintelligent subhuman savages if you know they had rich kingdoms before you!! the cognitive dissonance!! guess we'll just [delete] African history so everyone's on board with this uwu!! (4/)

so in the 1500s-1600s, depictions of every significant historical figure became white. you know the ones. some people today STILL THINK CLEOPATRA WAS WHITE. and ofc Jesus wasn't white! they knew this! (5/)

race wasn't a big deal to the Greeks. it wasn't a big deal to the Romans. nowhere in any Homeric poetry are there negative portrayals of black people simply for being black. race (and color) being invoked to subjugate POC originated from the colonizers. (6/)

the worst part about this is that the lies persist! even in my bougie college prep school, I only remember learning about colonial Africa in world history. idk why we spent more time on the many many japanese empires than the whole continent of Africa. (7/)

this knowledge needs to be more accessible, because we've all been lied to. and there's no better opportunity to educate ourselves and others about the origins of racism than right now. I hope we can right this horrific wrong somehow. (8/)

so yeah racism was invented by white Europeans to justify their inhuman exploitation of African labor just because they wanted sugar in their tea #blm